How the customer lifecycle can help structure your product strategy The business of ecommerce With Amazon gobbling up almost 50% of ecommerce sales in the US, traditional high street retail in steady decline and paid online customer acquisition...

Agile and the fail fast culture prioritise failing as a means of learning as quickly as possible and moving onto the next experiment. It rewards failure – and actively encourages it as a mechanism to learn what works and what doesn’t. Not everyone is a fan.

Perhaps the biggest challenge product teams face is not necessarily how to conduct the usability tests in the first place but rather how to make sense of the wild variety of results your tests have produced.

Transition from tragile to agile with strong devops cultures So what exactly is Devops anyway? You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘devops’ used by your engineering team but you may not be sure exactly what it means. Sure, you know that is has...

A classical definition of strategy applied to product thinking The problem with strategy Ask someone what their strategy is and you’ll often get vague responses relating to operational effectiveness, items from their to do list or a proclamation that their company is...

Fighting the forces of product inertia Overcoming the fear of thinking differently Suggesting different ideas or challenging conventional wisdom requires a certain level of tenacity. It also requires you to bulldoze through the fears that often beset the management...

Payment gateways, tokenisation, PCI compliance and webhooks explained Have you ever had the joy of working on a project which involved implementing a new payment provider? If you have, you’ll know that the process is not much fun if you don’t understand some of the...

How to establish an effective Product Council What’s a Product Council? Popularised by Marty Cagan in his book, Inspired, the Product Council is a forum which includes key business stakeholders. The purpose of the Product Council is to set the strategic direction of...

Pull requests, merges, branching and all that jazz Look down at your keyboard. You’ll notice that the letters g, i and t are quite close together. You’ll also notice that the letters g,i and t spell the word ‘git’. In the UK, ‘git’ is a derogatory word, often used to...

A product management perspective Go to any conference and you’ll notice 1 thing: a small, but substantial number of hyperactive humans aren’t fully present at the conference. They’re physically in the room but they are far, far away. Where are they? They are on Slack....

Bridging the gap between creative and commercial thinking Does generating revenue matter? A business is a repeatable process that makes money. Everything else is a hobby. —Paul Freet, Commercialisation Expert This is a neat way of summarising the definition of a...

Let's talk about product roadmaps What is a product roadmap? A Product Roadmap is a device which allows product managers and product teams to communicate the direction, vision and priorities of their product. The roadmap is a living, breathing, dynamic tool which...

How BDD scenarios can make your testing more human The difference between BDD and TDD BDD stands for behaviour driven development. TDD stands for test driven development. Both BDD and TDD refer to the methods of software development employed by your engineering team....

How clean is your product backlog? 1. What is backlog grooming? Backlog grooming sessions are designed to help product teams improve development processes and ultimately assist the whole team in building better products. Backlog grooming is also known as sizing,...

Why changing button colors isn't enough Google Jedi Marissa Mayer allegedly tested multiple variations of the color blue until she found the perfect shade of blue to increase conversions at Google. This kind of experimentation may be reasonable when you have tens of...

Why communication with your engineering team is critical ‘We need to spend time refactoring the code for the next few weeks’, says the engineer. ‘Burn in hell’, says the product manager. Why communication with your engineering team is critical If you want to be a...

Become all powerful by mastering the art of ideas We create them, curate them, destroy them, idolise the people who generate them and cling onto our own as though they’re our children. To be known as the ‘ideas person’ is for some reason feels like the ultimate kudos...